Who gets the most credit for the Capitals in the Stanley Cup Final?

Through television and the written word, I am one of former history professor Newt Gingrich’s most attentive students. His high intelligence is so challenging that whether I always agree with him or not, he makes me think. I had thought of voting for him if he runs for president in 2008 until his November 27 speech at the annual Loeb First Amendment dinner in Manchester, New Hampshire.

Newt Gingrich proposed “a serious national dialogue about the First Amendment what it protects, and what it should not protect.” He’s right, and I also agree thoroughly with his attack in New Hampshire on the McCain-Feingold so-called “campaign finance reform” law, which does indeed seriously weaken part of the core of the First Amendment political speech.

I also agree with him about the terrorists who want to kill us, and who operate on “a level of ferocity and a level of savagery beyond anything we’ve tried to handle.” Where I part with Mr. Gingrich is his proposed radical revisions of the First Amendment to deal with the terrorists.

This long-term war, he said that night, “will inevitably lead us to want to know what is said in every suspect place in the country (and) learn how to close down every Web site that is dangerous Before we lose a city or, if we are truly stupid, after we lose a city, we will use every technology we can find to break up their capacity to use free speech and stop from recruiting young people to destroy their lives while destroying us.” In New Hampshire, Mr. Gingrich kept citing the “we” who must and will shut down “dangerous” free speech. But on NBC’s “Meet the Press” (Dec. 16), he was more specific: three federal judges would decide when, and on whom, to close down the First Amendment. What would be the criteria of “dangerousness”? Would there be appeals against these rulings? He didn’t say.

During his Nov. 27 remarks, as reported in the New Hampshire Union Leader, I would have applauded when Mr. Gingrich spoke of the need for students to be stronger in science and math and said they also need to know more about American history.

Yes, indeed. How many know about the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798; Woodrow Wilson’s large-scale suspension of free speech during World War I; the mass internment, based on collective suspicion, of Japanese-Americans during World War II? Students immersed in our history, and learning the recoveries of the First Amendment, might ask Mr. Gingrich to slow down his understandably impassioned fear of our enemies’ unbounded ruthlessness fueled by insatiable hate of who we are. They might want him to be more specific on how we are going to change our free-speech heritage.

What safeguards will there be if the omnipresent monitors of what we say and write, those computers feeding the three federal judges, make mistakes about our loyalty to our nation? That a person of Mr. Gingrich’s exceptional intelligence and knowledge can speak so imprecisely of cutting into the First Amendment, from which all of our admittedly endangered liberties flow, warrants concern, particularly since many Americans are not familiar with the tumultuous history of the First Amendment and, as he points out, many students are being left behind in understanding the roots of the freedoms our enemies would destroy.

The fear of terrorism that Mr. Gingrich cites is real, but increasingly, so is the fear of some Americans that the government is targeting them as being among the terrorists. A Dec. 13 front-page story in USA Today is headlined: “Fear ‘as bad as after 9/11’: In Michigan and elsewhere, Muslims worry about hostile neighbors and surveillance.” Newt Gingrich, meet Ron Amen, described in the story as “a retired police officer, a Vietnam-war veteran, a U.S.-born son of U.S.-born parents.” He is an Arab-American, a Muslim, and he gets “a cold chill whenever I step into an airport” a target, he feels, for security screeners. Then there is Najah Bazzy, “a registered nurse and mother of four whose family has been in America for a century.” She wears a hijab, or headscarf.

“A $1.50 worth of material has become a symbol of aggression,” she says. “With only a headscarf, I’m scaring people.” And, writes USA Today reporter Rick Hampson, “if she gets into a conversation with a stranger, she denounces terrorism before even trying to explain her religion.” But not only American Muslims are in fear of being seen as dangerous. There are documents through the Freedom of Information Act showing that the FBI, Homeland Security and the Pentagon diligently are watching nonviolent protesters against various government policies, including Quakers and student groups, and storing their “dangerous” names in ever-expanding databases.

On Sept. 12, 2001, President Bush assured us: “We will not allow this enemy to win the war by changing our way of life or restricting our freedoms.” If we lose our First Amendment to the enemy, with the Fourth Amendment already vanishing, who will we then be, Newt?